May-Britt Moser

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May-Britt Moser with her husband Edvard Moser and the Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg (2014)

May-Britt Moser (born January 4, 1963 in Fosnavåg ) is a Norwegian neuroscientist . Together with her husband Edvard Moser , she is known for her work on spatial orientation and spatial memory , with which for the first time a psychological function on a mechanistic level could be traced back to the function of (individual) neurons . In 2014, she and her husband and John O'Keefe were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine .

Life

May-Britt Moser and her husband Edvard Moser studied mathematics, statistics, programming, neurobiology and psychology at the University of Oslo from 1982 . May-Britt Moser completed her studies in psychology in 1990. Both obtained a doctorate in neurophysiology from Per Andersen at the University of Oslo - May-Britt Moser in 1995 with the work Structural correlates of spatial learning in the hippocampus of adult rats . Before and after (as postdocs ) they were together with Richard G. Morris at the University of Edinburgh . Another postdoctoral position took her to John O'Keefe at University College London .

In 1996 they both returned to Norway to take up positions as associate professor for biopsychology at the Technical and Natural Sciences University of Norway (NTNU) in Trondheim , from 2000 with a full professorship for neurosciences. In 2002 she founded there the Center for the Biology of Memory , which in the 2007 Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience ( Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience was converted) and its director Edvard Moser and whose Vice Director May-Britt Moser was until 2012. Since 2013 (and 2022) is May-Britt Moser Head of the Norwegian Research Council for over 10 years with 175 million Norwegian crowns (≈ 24 million euros ) funded Center for Neural Computation at the Kavli Institute (Center for Neural calculations. See Computational Neuroscience ).

May-Britt Moser and her husband now (as of 2013) also hold a professorship for neurosciences at the NTNU Medical Faculty. The couple has two daughters.

Act

The Moser couple deals with the structures of the ( rat ) brain that are involved in spatial orientation , in planning a route and in the memory of spatial conditions (spatial memory). Neurons that are involved in these tasks are found in the hippocampus and in the entorhinal cortex , in which the Mosers 2005 grid cells (English, translated grid cells ) The grid cells work depending on the movement of an individual through his environment. The coordinate network formed by these cells is made up of equilateral triangles. The discovery of grid cells is considered to be one of the most important developments in neuroscience at the beginning of the 21st century. Grid cells have also been found in mice and bats (and primates ) and are believed to be found in all mammals , even if these cells have not yet been detected in humans.

The couple identified other cell types of the entorhinal cortex, each specialized in recognizing the direction of movement or recognizing the physical boundaries of the environment. The Mosers were also able to show that this information is processed by the neural excitation circuits of the spatial memory in the hippocampus. May-Britt and Edvard Moser explained the way in which the brain calculates the position of the individual in his environment, which has overcome previous ways of thinking in this regard.

More recent work deals with the question of how the grid cells , which are responsible for registering movement in space, interact with the place cells , a cell type described by John O'Keefe that specializes in recognizing certain locations.

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Leopoldina Newly Elected Members 2016, Leopoldina, Halle (Saale) 2017, p. 32 ( PDF )

Web links

Commons : May-Britt Moser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b May-Britt Moser at the Nobel Foundation (nobelprize.org); accessed on October 7, 2014.
  2. ↑ a b James Gorman: A Sense of Where You Are. The New York Times , April 29, 2013
  3. ↑ Medlemmer: Group IV General Biologi at the Royal Norwegian Scientific Society (dknvs.no); accessed on May 1, 2019.
  4. ↑ medlemmer Group 7: Medisinske fag at the Norwegian Academy of Sciences (dnva.no); Retrieved November 29, 2013
  5. ^ Fondation Louis-Jeantet - Lauréats. In: jeantet.ch. Retrieved February 11, 2016 (French).
  6. ↑ Norwegian scientists win Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize at the University of North Carolina (unchealthcare.org)
  7. ^ Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize at Columbia University (columbia.edu); accessed on October 7, 2014
  8. ↑ May-Britt Moser at the National Academy of Sciences (nasonline.org); accessed on May 1, 2019.
  9. ↑ May-Britt and Edvard Moser - 2014 Körber Prize winners at the Körber Foundation (koerber-stiftung.de); accessed on May 1, 2019.
  10. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. May-Britt Moser at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on July 29, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Moser, May-Britt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th January 1963
PLACE OF BIRTH Fosnavåg